Happy to announce that John Brazell’s song “City Girl” will be on the CW tonight at 9PM (8 Central). I had the pleasure of engineering, playing on, and co-producing his album Restless Heart, which you can find on iTunes and Amazon.

I rewired a Mogami snake today, changing the channels 1/2 from TRS to XLR for an engineering friend of mine who is rewiring his studio to accomodate some new gear. It’s a simple & easy task, but for your reference, make sure you’re wiring the hot and cold (2/3) correctly. The correct wiring process is shown in this image, courtesy of mediacollege.com.

Not shown in this image: make sure you tie the chassis ground lug to pin 1 with some good heavy-gauge wire (I use 18), so that the chassis ground is an extension of the grounding sleeve of the cable. The only time NOT to do this is when you have a studio that is running some really old British gear, and most of the time properly-maintained studios will lift the chassis ground on the gear side, not the cable side. Those crazy Brits still call ground “earth”.

An artist I truly enjoy working with, John Brazell, released three mellow Christmas tunes for you to enjoy, including a wonderful original. You can get them for FREE here on his NoiseTrade page (not to mention his awesome album sampler that I engineered as well). Who doesn’t love good, free music? Listen below:

Hello, BCHS parents, students, and faculty! I’ve uploaded the Junior High and High School Christmas Concert performances. I’ve uploaded these as MP3s, you can access them by clicking on the links below.

A good friend and excellent artist Tudor Williams has been releasing some singles from his upcoming album. I did a bit of work on this one here (although 99% of it was his incredible producer & engineer, Brandon Hallam), called “Tequila”:

Was just listening to some stuff I worked on with Peter Tvrznik. What a fantastic songwriter, with a great voice to boot! We’re working on a new single now, and I’m very excited about it. Check out some of his music here. And while you’re here, here’s his website and Facebook page.

Happy to announce that Bleecker Street Company’s Interstate Love EP is dropping today. I had the pleasure of doing some mixing, tracking, programming, and playing bass on this project. Go give them a listen, you can buy their new EP on Bandcamp. If you’re into Mazzy Star-esque tunes that ease your soul whilst driving down the open highway. You can also check them out on Facebook, and get a FREE TRACK by clicking here.

Did a bit of strange tracking today for the inimitable Tudor Williams’ upcoming full-length album, Exotic Ancers. Tudor and his producer wanted the feel and creativity of a great drummer, but paired with the excellent sounds and versatility of the incredible Steven Slate Drums plugin. In order to achieve this, we simply ran 7 dynamic mics (in various ranges of crappiness, depending on how much isolation we needed) as close to their respective kit pieces as possible. It was DEFINITELY easier than fully mic’ing and finessing 8-10 nice microphones on a expensive and finely-tuned drum kit, although I cringed every time I heard the real-time drum sounds we were getting out of the mics. It looked something like this: Continue reading →

Today, I had the pleasure of working on a beautiful vintage Wurlitzer 200 for an old professor and INSANELY TALENTED pianist, Joel Clifft. Unfortunately, at some point it had been futzed around with, and hence wasn’t passing any audio. Turned out that the reed bar had been disconnected from the preamp, but in any case I got to take some naked photos of the board. Enjoy!

All undressed. NAUGHTY.

The hammers and preamp/power amp circuitboard.

The hammer assemblies, and the reed bar underneath.

Big, fat, lovely vintage Japanese capacitors, along with the power amp transistors.